Upscale Vegan Dining In NYC East Village

Avant Garden, a small place just off Tompkins Square Park in NYC’s East Village, owned by cocktail magnate Ravi DeRossi, a vegan most of his life.

Davi DeRossi, the restaurateur and nightlife man behind many an East Village cocktail bar (including Mayahuel, Amor Y Amargo, and Cienfuegos), opens a vegan restaurant called Avant Garden in New York City’s East Village. The restaurant is an upscale eatery, whose mission is to help raise the bar on high end vegan dining.

The chic east village restaurant is outfitted with an open kitchen and a long counter. Kitchen staff double as wait staff, and serve all the dishes themselves. The wood grain-y feeling of the decor brings in the great outdoors—if the great outdoors came with cozy fabric chairs and elegant votive holders.

The kitchen, led by Executive Chef Andrew D’Ambrosi, executes veggie-focused dishes like gourmet toasts topped with pickled peach, tomato, almond ricotta, and basil (Tomato Jam, $12) and cold dishes including a Kale Panzanella salad with onion, olive, garlic and croutons ($14). There’s no steak on the menu but mushrooms are the star of the King Oyster ($18), with miatake, smoked macadamia, and crispy leeks. The menu also includes homemade pastas, salads, and roasted vegetable entrees.

To go hand in hand with the opening of this new vegan venture, DeRossi also launched a nonprofit, BEAST (stands for Benefits to End Animal Suffering Today), which will host regular fundraisers for animal rights organizations. “The idea is to try to make it cool,” he says, to throw parties at bars and show that vegans aren’t all “crunchy granola, tree-hugging” types.